#but back real early in development before it was decided the disaster masters would be kinda like

[noisemastter]

so,

its like that

[texastheband]

Texas V Wu-Tang Clan

Interview by Steven Daly Photography by Peter Robathan Taken from The Face - December 1997

It’s the pop story of ’97, the most unlikely end to a weird year: TEXAS collaborating with the WU-TANG CLAN. First, a Scottish rock band on the verge of slip-sliding away into a tasteful obscurity was reborn via a slew of hit singles and a glut of stylish imagery. Now, in New York, their Brit-cool meets hip hop in a mutually beneficial deal. For everyone concerned, it’s all they need to get on…

Sharleen Spiteri took the call in her front hall. "Yo, Peach," growled a strange voice over transatlantic wires. The gentleman caller was none other than Ol’ Dirty Bastard, court jester of New York hip hop dynasty the Wu-Tang Clan. Apparently Mr Bastard fancied working with Spiteri and her band, Texas. It all started in August, with one of Texas’ managers discussing Land Rovers with someone called Power in New York, who turned out to be the manager of the Clan. A video of Texas’ "Say What You Want" was dispatched, and prodigiously gifted Wu-Tang chieftain RZA signed on to do a re-recording of the single for a prospective single project. Original rapper OI’ Dirty Bastard was replaced by Method Man, the next Clan member with a solo album scheduled.

The hook-up with the Wu-Tang Clan is the perfect climax to a year that’s seen Texas rise from a tumbleweed-strewn grave to grab the pole position in British Pop. A year in which Glasgow’s Sharleen Spiteri has stared out, defiantly remade and remodelled, from every magazine cover and TV show. From a media point-of-view, Texas’ – Spiteri’s – reconfiguring of music and fashion has been the year’s dream ticket. Ever since Bryan Ferry took the innovative step of getting Anthony Proce in to design Roxy Music’s wardrobe in the early seventies, successive phases of pop’s history have thrown up performers who use the fashion photographers, stylists and designers du jour to present The Package. It is these performers who most often capture the youthful mood of their time: that’s why you can see the vulgar glamour of the Seventies in the cut of Ferry’s sleazy lounge-lizard jib; the naive aspiration of the early Eighties in the box-suited and pixie-booted "style" of Spandau Ballet; and the onset of the late-Eighties mixing and matching of different cultures in Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance. When we look back at 1997 we will see in Texas’ sound and vision a new mix, all to do with living the high life but keeping it real. Catwalk and street, the designer and the understated, Prada and Nike; the slick and the cred. Ten years’ gone Scottish guitar outfit and this season’s bright young labels (in both senses). The setting too, has helped. Fashion, again, is big cultural business. Clever pop stars (Goldie! Liam!) want to be seen by the runway and hanging out at fashion parties; young designers yearn to be visible on the stage or the podium (viz. Antonio Berardi’s autumn London show at Brixton Academy). Factor in a paucity of self-motivating, button-pressing, songwriting, photogenic women in British music, and you have a ready-made media phenomenon.

Sharleen Spiteri is holding court at a New York restaurant with a gang of Calvin Klein employees who’ve just accompanied her to the VH-1 Fashion Awards. The annual ceremony is a mutually convenient arrangement, a TV cluster-fuck where the music and fashion industries exchange credibility and cachet. Texas are contemplating just such an exchange themselves, having recently been given the OK by CK. (Tommy Hilfiger has also made overtures.) Spiteri is to have an audience with Klein himself; she’s already been bribed with a trunkful of CK merch, including the streaked black dress – "inspired by [the artist] Brice Marden" – she’s wearing tonight.

Someone suggests that Texas would be perfect for Fashionably Loud, an MTV special where models strut on stage as the hot bands of the moment rock out. "Forget it," quips Spiteri. "there’s only room for one star up where we play." If Spiteri were to join Kate Moss and Christy Turlington on the Calvin Klein payroll it would not, as she sees it, detract from Texas’ music. "Fashion and music have always been connected, and now more than ever," says the singer. "You couldn’t have one without the other. If there’s shit music at a runway show it just doesn’t work."

Meanwhile, there’s the songs. With "White On Blonde", Texas’ fourth album, the music takes care of itself. Radio-friendly unit-shifters abound, helped on their way by producers Mike hedges (manic Street Preachers) and Manchester’s Grand Central. The singles have been, in sequence, nu-soul fresh ("Say What You Want"), springy pop ("Halo"), Motown-sunny ("Black Eyed Boy") and winter warming ("Put Your Arms Around Me"). The B-side remixers have covered all bases in these dance-savvy late Nineties, ranging from of-the-moment talents like the Ballistic Brothers and Trailerman to old stand-bys like Andy Weatherall and 808 State. Texas, patently, lost their dancefloor cherry by cherry-picking the brightest and the best.

Of course, while the singles have all enjoyed heavy airplay and gone top ten, and while "White on Blonde" has sold two million copies (more than its two predecessors put together), the remixes haven’t necessarily helped those sales. As the go-faster stripes of credibility on the solid saloon car, though, they’ve still been essential to The Package; all part of the thoroughly modern mix.

So now, the Wu-Tang Clan. To many, though, this latest development could smack of opportunism. One group are renegade roughnecks who mythologise themselves in epic hip hop anthems; the others are fastidiously tasteful Scots with an eye for perfectly modern consensus-pop. The Wu-Tang Clan are certainly among the aesthetically correct names that Texas always drop in interviews, but can there possibly be a legitimate connection between the two? "A lot of the Wu-Tang backing tracks have the feel of soundtracks, and we’ve always gone for a cinematic sound," says Johnny McElhone, Spiteri’s genial songwriting partner and bass player. "And I’ve always liked Al Green, and they use a lot of Willie Mitchell, Al Green, that whole Hi Records sound, and make it modern. And Marvin Gaye: Method Man, in that duet with Mary J. Blige, used ‘You’re All I Need To Get By."

Having dominated the charts in Europe this year, Texas are now, logically, turning their attention to America: the country that has always inspired them, whether it’s the dusty, pseudo-roots sound of their first three albums, or the iconic-soul and post-soul sounds of Memphis and Staten Island that they give props to now; the place where success has always eluded them. Yet given the commercial momentum of "White on Blonde", their approach to the Wu-Tang Clan is surely not driven by desperation. They are, then, viewing the collaboration with a combination of fan-like wonder and disbelief.

"Method Man is just a wicked, wicked rapper," enthuses Spiteri. "I can’t wait to hear the combination of my vocals and his – I‘m really excited about it. I have a kind of sweet, virginal thing going on, and he’s got this dirty sex vibe. It could be the perfect marriage."

It’s a Saturday night in Manhattan, and ten storeys above Times Square, Sharleen Spiteri sits on the floor of a recording studio, tinkering with her latest high-tech gadget, a Philips computer about the size of a TV remote. Across the street, three ten-foot high electronic ticker-tapes provide testimony to Monday’s stockmarket crash. No matter how much Spiteri plays with her new toy, there’s still that nagging worry: what if the Wu-Tang Clan won’t show? They’re supposed to be on a tour bus returning from a gig in Washington, DC today, but these, after all, are the original masters of disaster. The crew whose normal modus operandi seems to be chaos. The band that recently quit a national tour because only five of the nine members could be relied upon to turn up.

The studio has been booked since six, so Spiteri and McElhone breathe signs of relief when RZA and his posse finally roll in around ten. Among the dozen-strong throng, they’re surprised to see Wu-Tang member Reakwon, a stout fellow with a Mercedes cap and a Fort Knox of gold dental work. Several cigars are hollowed out, their contents replaced with weed; bottles of Cristal champagne and Hennessy are passed around as the air grows thick with smoke.

Half an hour later, method Man makes his entrance. Stooped over, he looks deceptively short – maybe only six-four in his Hilfiger fleece hoodie. "I’m John-John," he tells Sharleen, referring to his alias, Johnny Blaze. Pulling out the big blunt from behind his ear, Method Man considers the job at hand. "She got a nice voice," drawls the laconic giant. "This band not exactly my type of listening material, but they going in the right direction, if you ask me, by fucking with us. I’m waiting for RZA to put down a beat, hear how the vocals sound melded with the track before I come with ideas. I’m one of those guys."

As his friends get on with the serious business of partying, RZA goes to work, feeding a succession of sample-laden discs into a sampler. He has a diffident, genius-at-work charisma about him as he sits with his back to the room, keyboard at side. With a flick of his prodigiously ringed hand he reaches out and conjures up a brutal bassline. The speakers pulse violently. RZA takes a sip of Hennessy. "Record this, right here!" he tells the bewildered-looking engineer.

RZA has decided to dispense with the original master tapes, shipped over from Britain. He wants a completely new version, recorded rough-and-ready without the standard safety net of a time-code. This convention-trashing, wildstyle approach to recording elicits some consternation from the studio’s engineer, a central-casting white guy who warns RZA: "You won’t be able to synch to this, you know." RZA waves him away and turns to Johnny McElhone. "This riff is in E," McElhone tells RZA. "Maybe we should try it in the original key, D." "What are you saying? I understand no keys," says RZA. "You want me to sing the whole song straight through?" asks Spiteri, trying to divine RZA’s intentions. He orders the lights turned down, and offers Sharleen some herbal inspiration. She politely declines and walks to the vocal booth. "What’s her name? Sheree?" asks RZA as Spiteri warms up. The engineer wants to know if he should maybe start recording. "Always record everything!" exclaims RZA. "Ready, get set, go! Play and record, play and record!" Spiteri rattles of a perfect new version of ‘Say What You Want’, grooving along by herself and passionately acting out every word, even the ones borrowed from Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing". Now it’s time for Method Man, who at this point is so herbally inspired that he can hardly open his eyes. He jumps up and lopes around the main room, running off his newly written rhymes and clutching a bottle of Crystal. Method walks up to the mic and opens his mouth, and that treacly baritone sets a typically morbid scene: "Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest…" The Texas duo just look at each other, shaking their heads in awe.

The hours and the rhymes pass. Around 6am, things are starting to get a little weird. As Method Man snoozes on the sofa, RZA bounces off the walls, dancing like a dervish. "These are the new rhythms," he yells. "These are the new dances from Africa. I learned them when I was there last week!" McElhone and Spiteri crack up. The engineer probably wishes he were in Africa right now; he further draws RZA’s ire by making a mistake as he runs off some rough cassettes. As everyone says goodbye, RZA decides that he’s taking the studio’s sampler – he already has two of the $3,500 items, but at this point it’s all about the wind-up. The engineer, though, having last seen the end of his tether a good few hours ago, has had enough. By the commencement of office hours that morning, the rest of the session will have been cancelled and the band and Clan banned from this studio.

After a few frantic phone calls later that morning, a studio is found that is prepared to let the Wu-Tang Clan through the door. With one precondition: only two of them are allowed in the studio. Now it’s midnight, and four-fifths of Texas watch a trio of RZA-hired session men go through their paces. They shift effortlessly through a handful of soul and funk styles, and the Scots mutter approval. These are the kind of players that are so good they can get away with wearing questionable knitwear.

Soon, another couple of Wus pop in. Then another couple. In the control room RZA orders up a bottle of Hennessy and talks about hearing "Say What You Want" for the first time. "I didn’t fully understand the sound of it," admits the soft-spoken maestro. "It was obviously a popular song, a radio song, and my sound is the total opposite. But I thought that the artist had something, so I thought: "Let’s take her and rock her to my beat."

"Sweet soul, that’s what her stuff sounded like to me. Smooth. It reminded me of the Seventies: in those days, they did songs that would fit anywhere. If you went to a club getting high it would fit; if you was cleaning up your house it would fit. That’s when you’ve got a real great song right there." Whether or not "Say What You Want" is a great song, it’s not quite coming together tonight. Despite the best offers of the studio management, a full complement of Wu posse members ended up in the house. As the night drags on the trio of musicians don’t get with the track, and by eight the following morning there is little in the way of usable material. But everyone stays upbeat. Texas will work on the track in Glasgow, and send it back to RZA to finish, along with a new song based around one of his samples. After vowing to stay in touch, everyone stumbles out into the Manhattan morning light together, the Scots with an American name, and the Clan without a tartan.

From a distance the collaboration will continue. But it’s only a different kind of distance. Culturally, creatively, the gap between the Wu-Tang Clan and the old twang clan is considerable. Yet so it goes, this cross-cultural exchange programme. Whether it’s The Stones copping blues movies, Bowie digging the Philadelphia Sound, Lisa Stansfield getting soulful with Barry White, Sting getting doleful with Puff Daddy… Whether it’s Todd Terry reviving Everything But The Girl or Armand Van Helden making Sneaker Pimps the unwitting jumpstarters of speed garage, naked opportunism and risk-taking innovation have always been confused. Now, with genres blurred and tricknology proceeding apace, anything is possible and everything is permitted. Perhaps it is this, the sheer unlikeliness, that makes the Texas-Wu experiment the most illuminating collaboration of the year. Whether it works or not.

"If you play her stuff in a club, everybody be dancing, but it’s a clear room and you can see everybody’s face," RZA reflects on the departing Sharleen Spiteri. "But if you play mine, the room is smoky." And perhaps it is here, among the clouds and the clarity, between the smoke and the mirrors, where a new sound and vision lies.

Text originally posted on texasindemand.com

[scoutception]

Final Fantasy I review: a pragmatic evolution

Final Fantasy; one of the largest and most influential game franchises out there, and my personal favorite video game series. It’s kind of surreal to think that it started out as what was basically an unlicensed Dungeons & Dragons adaptation from a failing company that only approved it to try to top Dragon Quest, like so many others back then. For all the faults it had, like being so utterly buggy that it artificially increased difficulty through things like mages not actually being able to gain more power for their magic, and several spells not even working, period, it pulled through with an innovative team building system, a great soundtrack that would help cement Nobou Uematsu as one of the great video game soundtrack composers, and a much more developed exploration system compared to Dragon Quest, giving you access to vehicles like an airship. For this review, however, I shall be reviewing the PSP version of Final Fantasy I, which is quite a different experience, for reasons I shall tackle shortly. Otherwise, in we go.

Story

The story is about a world home to 4 elemental crystals of earth, fire, water, and wind, which once blessed the land and its inhabitants with peace. However, the Four Fiends, the Lich, Marilith, the Kraken, and Tiamat, have since corrupted the crystals, depriving the world of their blessings and causing the appearance of monsters across the land. Despite the bleakness, however, the people keep faith in one thing: a prophecy stating that four Warriors of Light will appear one day to restore the crystals and defeat the Four Fiends. 400 years after the first of the fiends appeared, the Warriors of Light finally arrive at the town of Cornelia, where they are tasked by its king to save his daughter, Princess Sarah, from Garland, a traitorous knight, who has taken her to the Chaos Shrine. Afterwards, the king builds a bridge in gratitude, allowing them to skip over to the next town and beat up some pirates for their ship. Most of the “plot” of this game takes the form of fetching key items and chains of deals that stand in the way of you actually taking the fight to the Fiends, with the worst taking place right after getting the ship, involving almost every single area you can even visit at that time. It was probably a bit more interesting at the time, especially compared to Dragon Quest, but it’s a huge drag nowadays.

After killing all of the Fiends, the game decides to pull a twist: as it turns out, an evil force 2000 years in the past is still stealing the power of the crystals, originating from the Chaos Shrine. After traveling through a time portal, and killing all the Four Fiends again, the game pulls a bigger twist: they find Garland at the bottom of the shrine, having been sent back in time by the Fiends. Using their power to transform into the monster Chaos, he then used his power to send them into the present, creating some time loop that allows him to live forever. After defeating him, the Warriors of Light are returned to the present, having retroactively prevented any of the disasters from taking place, even ensuring Garland would never betray Cornelia. Doing this erases their memories of their journey, but the legend of it still lives on.... somehow. It’s not exactly a deep plot, but it can still be decently entertaining to go through, especially with the vastly improved translation of the later versions, which gives quite a bit of dialogue a surprising amount of charm.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Final Fantasy I is about the most standard NES era RPG you could get. You travel on a world map, exploring towns and dungeons and getting into random encounters, with the battle system also being a very standard turn based system, selecting all your party’s actions at the beginning of each turn, and having choices of attacking, using magic, using an item, defending, or attempting to escape. You gain the use of a ship, a canoe, and eventually an airship which pretty much invalidates any other form of travel for navigating the world map, though the ship can only dock at certain spots, and the airship can only land on grass tiles. This can pose a problem to a new player, as the continents are large and often force you to land farther away from your goal than you might expect. This is doubly bad as the game initially seems to lack a map feature, which can make navigation very difficult sense the map loops when you reach an edge of it. While there is actually a map you can access on the world map, which even displays the locations you’ve discovered, you can only bring it up by hitting a button combination the game never outright tells you, only being mentioned, and backwards, at that, by some brooms in an early area (it’s ok, it’s the home of a witch), which could be passed off as random nonsense if you’re not in the mood to think laterally.

The most interesting gameplay feature FF1 has to offer is its party building system. Instead of just gaining predetermined characters as you go on like, say, MOTHER, or only having one character, like Dragon Quest itself, you have 4 party members all the time that you select at the start of the game, picked from 6 different classes: the Warrior, the very standard physical fighter with great attack and defense, whose only real downside is being very reliant on equipment, the Monk, who is pretty much the opposite of the fighter, being a physical fighter who specializes in fighting unarmed, to the point of equipment actually lowering his attack and defense after a while, making him very cheap to use, and very broken after the first few levels. There’s also the Thief, which is bad on defense, but is good for attacking and has superior speed. The second half of the classes are magically focused. The White Mage specializes in healing and support magic, though they also have offense in the form of the Dia line of spells, which is effective against undead, and Holy, one of the major attacking spells of the series. The Black Mage, conversely, focuses on offensive magic, though they also have access to some very good buff, though they’re perhaps the most vulnerable of any class, with abysmal HP growth, at that. Lastly, there’s the Red Mage, the jack of all trades, master of none. They can use swords, have good defense, and access to both white and black magic, though they’re worse at all of those than the classes that focus on them individually, and can’t use most of the later game spells or equipment, though since you’re stuck with your chosen classes all the way, they’re never an outright burden, and plenty of people find them great regardless.

Aside from leveling up from fighting random encounters, you power up your party by buying equipment, or finding it in dungeons or other areas, and buying spells from towns. There’s 8 spell tiers in all, with all having 4 different spells per tier for both black and white magic. However, the spellcasters can only know up to three spells for each tier, with the red mage having to use those spaces for both white and black magic. Some tiers have better spells than others, with most spells more complex than simple healing or damage usually not being worthwhile. However, a lot of spells and equipment available around the time you get the airship is not actually usable by your party members, and this is because of a sidequest offered by Bahamut, the king of the dragons, to go within the Citadel of Trials and retrieve a rat tail. Doing so will cause for your party members to class change, aka basically promote into stronger classes. The Warrior becomes the Knight, the Monk becomes the Master, the Thief becomes the Ninja, the White Mage becomes the White Wizard, the Black Mage becomes the Black Wizard, and the Red Mage becomes the Red Wizard. This grants them better stat growth and access to stronger equipment and spells, and the Knight and Ninja gain white and black magic, respectively.

The NES version of FF1 is infamously difficult, but over the many ports, starting with the Playstation version, and most notably advanced with the GBA version, the game became much, much easier. Whether it be the fixing of damaging bugs or the ability to save anywhere instead of the world map, which, granted, was only sensible considering portable console, to switching the spell system from each tier only being usable a certain amount of times before needing recharging at an inn, something borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons, to switching to a much more traditional MP system, to just a general rebalancing of the classes, it makes for a much easier game to get through. Too easy, honestly. You gain experience much, much faster, so as long as you fight the majority of the encounters you get into, you’ll quickly end up overpowered. It’s very easy to reach level 99, and much of the best equipment is easy to get. However, I don’t think the easier difficulty, and the general simplicity of the gameplay, are necessarily bad things. On the contrary, it makes the game very easy to pick up and play through, and it’s surprisingly fun despite how simple the combat is. This, I think, is the saving grace of the game, and even if that doesn’t satisfy you, the bonus content added in the later ports are the highlights of the game.

The GBA version added four bonus dungeons collectively called the Soul of Chaos, unlocked after each Fiend you defeat. These dungeons consist of a set amount of different, and often wacky, floors that load in a randomized order. While the first two dungeons are fairly standard and short, stuff begins picking up with the third, and the fourth is a 40 floor gauntlet of fun and creative little challenges and maps. In addition, each dungeon contains cameo bosses from Final Fantasy 3-6, complete with remixes of their boss themes for the PSP versions. These include Shinryu and Omega, who are the hardest bosses in the GBA version, and Gilgamesh, one of the most famous characters in the series. All in all, these dungeons are actually really fun to go through, as long as you’re properly leveled, and are definitely refreshing compared to how most RPGs handle bonus dungeons. On that subject, however, is the Labyrinth of Time, added in the PSP version. It consists of time puzzles, 30 in all, though you only do so many in each run, that ends with a fight against a newly added superboss, and the usurper of the title of hardest boss in the game, Chronodia. The catch is that Chronodia has 8 different variations, with different rewards and bestiary entries for each, and which one you encounter depends on how many puzzles you finish in time, and how many you only complete after running out of time, causing a fog to roll in that saps you of your HP and MP, and allows random encounters while in the puzzle areas. While creative, the Labyrinth of Time is overall maddeningly difficult and not fun. This is one to skip if you value your sanity.

Sound & Graphics

The graphics of FF1, again, judging the PSP version, are actually really good. The characters look distinct, and the monster graphics especially are great, and represent Yoshitaka Amano’s designs for them very, very well.

The areas are also surprisingly well designed. From the ruins of the Chaos Shrine, and the complete version of it as the final dungeon, to the underwater ruins that house the lair of the Kraken, to, most notably, the flying fortress of the Lufenian civilization, home to Tiamat and far advanced compared to all the other locations, especially in the original NES version, where it’s a space station, of all things.

As for the music, it holds up amazingly. Aside from many of the most famous themes of the series, such as the Preude, themes like the town theme and the Chaos Shrine theme are amazingly atmospheric, and it overall still stands out as one of the best soundtracks in the series to me. Even if he wasn’t involved in the rearranging for the remakes, this was a significant step for composer Nobou Uematsu.

Conclusion

Despite how fond I am of this game, my recommendation rating depends. If you’re looking for a nice, easy to pick up RPG, perhaps as an introduction to the series, or to RPGs in general, I would give this a recommended. If you’re looking for much past that, however, I would give it a not recommended. As transformed as it is, it is still a very old game underneath, with unclear goals, very barebones gameplay systems, and with all the innovation it did have swept away over the years. Still, if nothing else, it’s a very respectable start to Final Fantasy. Until next time.

-Scout

[the-salamanders-xo]

Humans are Weird, a Mash Up, Pt. 5

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through your feed

You scrolled down and down, with so little heed

For the posts and the gifs, flicking by on the screen

Only passing by, tough little by what was seen

Cause late is the hour, and darkened is the light

On the porch , in the hall, and the desk, this Christmas night

There you have sat in your bed, hour after hour

Watching slowly as your phone loses power

And along comes a message, a blip, a note

Of our hero Karry, alight on a dust mote.

Hello, there everyone! As an early Christmas present, here is part five to our story. On our way to the ‘home planet’ as it were, and one step further on Karry’s journey. So Merry Christmas! Enjoy the read!

~~~

The sleek pistol bucked in Karry’s hands emitting a sharp whine, and the mass of plaster and wire at the far end of the firing range disintegrated into minuscule pieces, and the centimeter long projectile vaporized itself against the force-field protecting the bulkhead. 

“Good shot,” a disembodied voice said, as Karry slid the protective goggles from her eyes as the last fragments fell to the deck, “If slightly to the left.”

“So long as it hits, it doesn’t seem to matter much,” she observed, laying the weapon down carefully. “That thing is awesome.” Other weapons sat prominently in the racks behind what would have been the ranger master’s desk, and Karry eyed them wistfully. 

“So, is your favorite still the fletchette gun,” chuckled the ancient machine from the intercom’s speakers, “or has the pulser taken better?” For the last few days it had taken the immense ship, a former troop transport of sorts, Mark, a sentient alien machine from a far off sun, had been show casing various small arms of the now-extinct Concordiat of Manticore’s armed forces, and the ship wrecked human had taken to them with a sort of fiendish delight. 

“Nah,” she replied, “That one is a real beast to play with.” As she spoke, the various weapons on display retracted into recessed storage panels, and the lights above the range began to dim to nothingness. A robotic servitor came to retrieve the pulser and goggles, and she handed them over. “Still, why didn’t you show me this one first? It was a lot easier to use, at least.”

“It took longer to modify for your use,” Mark replied, as another servitor guided her out of the room into the corridor. “All of the weapons had to be; the Manticorians had different hands and limbs from humans, and using them in their original state would have proved overly difficult, and a weapon that one does not know how to use is one that is dangerous to its user. Modifying them was simpler and safer.” 

“Hmm.” Overall, the trip had really improved from its beginning. Before, on the distant outpost now three days behind them, the Bolo had absolutely no idea how to deal or even interact with the strange being that had drifted into his ‘care’... or imprisonment, which ever was decided on in the end. But from accidentally locking Karry into a room, he had gone to careful watchfulness, obviously trying to keep anything from hurting Karry. Both physically, and mentally. 

And Karry still struggled with that. Every few hours, she would wander her way to the observation blister that Mark had led her to after the first attack had left her bouncing around the corridors and troop compartments in a state of panic, trying to find anyplace that didn’t seem to close in on her. From there she could look into the vastness of space, and at times see the steadily approaching star whose child they sought. She had spent most of a ‘night’ there in the beginning, and the only other respite from the attacks was, apparently, the arms range. 

Mark had seemed pleased with it, if only as an excuse to finally share his vast military knowledge with someone close enough to converse with... and didn’t already posses the same. While she had torn apart ballistics dummies and targets by the crate load, he had gone on and on over the history of the weapon’s development, what had changed between models, and the various battles that had prompted the changes. She hadn’t really listened, but Mark had no issues. He know that mere organics didn’t have the same clarity of memory as one of silicon circuits and molecular bytes, he just simply enjoyed sharing it. 

They wandered down the corridor towards the bridge, and another, different voice spoke up, a soft, cool soprano and a stark contrast to Marks deep baritone. 

“We will be orbit over the planet Sphinx within the hour, Karry,” and she nodded. The ship had it’s own AI, which shared its name: Websin, which according to Mark was the name of an ancient war hero. While nowhere near the same capacity of Mark or other Bolos (so he claimed at least), it had also taken an affinity to Karry, if only as the first organic it had ferried anywhere in millennia. 

“Okay, does that mean we’re almost done here?” Supposedly, she was off to see what passed for the governing body of the remnants of the Manticorian’s artificial creations. Mark and Websin refused to say anymore, which lead Karry to think that they didn’t know much more beyond it than she, so she had just gone with it. At least she got to see some cool guns and toys. 

“Almost, Karry,” Websin replied as they approached the last corridor, “At least, with the trip here.”

The bridge doors slid open, and Karry and the servitor entered. Slightly cramped and darkly lit, various strange chairs sat at the various panels and desks arrayed around the holotank. The holotank, a pool-like depression in the forward center of the bridge, currently showed an image of the planet Sphinx itself: a collection of emerald green continents crossed with coppery mountains, and topped with massive ice caps to the north and south, half shadowed in its own bulk. Those shadows faintly glowed with spiderwebs of light, branching from a near invisible seashore toward its interior, glowing like cracks in a mud-caked crystal ball. In days before, the tank had shown a graphic representation of the star system itself, a binary set of stars, and the many shells of orbital platforms around them and their planets and asteroid belts, dots and lines upon a black back drop of empty space. 

Karry slid into on of the chairs to the left of the tank, and watched the diagrams on the display in front of her as the ship began its slow approach. She had learned quite a bit about the ships systems, though a lot still confused her. But she could tell by the increase in the ship’s particle shielding strength that they may not be stopping at the orbit. She sat at the edge of her seat in anticipation. This was gonna be cool. 

Mark paused in his careful watch over the human as a query came from Websin, and turned his attention to the transport’s awareness. Yes? The reply came quickly. 

We are being hailed by Command. 

Then why not put them on the bridge communications? 

They wish to converse with Us... privately. 

If Mark had eyes like a human, they would have narrowed. But Command was trustworthy; what ever their base intentions were as created by the Manticorians, they would not turn such tactical scheming toward an nonthreatening being as the human. But still worried. Very well.

The communication was unhindered by distance, and a channel request was quickly sent, and opened. Although it was simply data, a variation of characters via light and radio, it still seemed as though a voice to the two cybernetic beings.

Unit 36/G-0104/MRK and MCNS Websin, the ‘voice’ said, we wish to inform you as to the current situation as to the human, and of our own situation.

Yes?  The two replied, Please continue. 

There is a degree of division between factions as to our course of action,  Command admitted, the unified voice of dozens of AIs, split into three ‘voices’ as it were. 

The first and largest agrees with the initial conclusion you yourselves first came to when contact and communication was first initiated: the Human must be returned home. At the very least, an attempt should be made, out of simple decency and ethics, according to the programming and intentions of the Creators. Unfortunately, that very confusion had earned some backlash. 

The second faction argues that attempting to return the Human could reveal ourselves and our charges to the Enemy, and that it could conceivably be that the Enemy has engineered this and any hundred of variations to lure us out of hiding. Naturally, given the illogical nature of this argument, and the calculated impossibility and improbability, this is the smallest faction, and is only put forth to aid in solving the issue. It is the third faction that deems the biggest threat to the Human’s well being.

And it? Mark asked, a microsecond passing as his awareness pondered the cause. 

The third faction is composed mostly of the emergent AIs, those whose sentience was of accident and chance. They played the smallest part in the struggle that destroyed what we were before, and have since formed their conception of the Manticorians into a semi-religious view. They challenge our interpretation of the Creators’ intentions for us, our purpose and duty, and accuse us of intentionally limiting their rise and spread. There was a pause. 

The Manticorians, the Creators, and even all organic sentient life is considered holy, almost God-like to some of the Emergents. They wish to keep the Human, to worship and to praise, and challenge our place as the designated Command. 

This was troubling. Mark could tell that the situation had, quite unknowingly, led to a dangerous field. If played wrong, the religion game and the effort to aid Karry in her return home could spark a war between machines, one which the Emergents were totally unable to win, and one Command would be unwilling to start. Such a conflict could spell disaster for the various peoples under their protection, and certainly leave Command unable to protect them from a future Enemy. 

But Command had to have a plan: they would not have informed Mark and Websin otherwise. 

And what do you believe is the best choice? Mark asked, hoping that there would be an answer. 

We will play their game. The smugness was evident over the com, and dawning realization came to Mark. Land at these coordinates, Websin, and try not to scorch the landing pad too badly. 

Karry had barely stood up to watch their planetary approach, unaware of the lightning fast conversation between the AIs over the still-vast space between them, when Mark spoke. 

“This planet, as I have explained, was once set aside for it’s native people,” he said. “Yet was still largely colonized before the war.”

“Yeah,” Karry replied, “You mentioned it.”

“Before conflict could come to this region, many of the Manticorian people were evacuated, and those who stayed behind eventually perished,” the Bolo continued distractedly, as if he hadn’t heard her. But he had. “But the cities and infrastructure remain, if overgrown and somewhat deteriorated. Many AIs and others moved in, repopulated as it were.” 

Karry frowned. She wasn’t sure where Mark was going with this, but she was sure that he would get there eventually. 

“We are going to take a more scenic route than normal,” Websin said, a slight smile hiding in her voice, “So if you want you can head to the observitory blister to see the trip down.” A beep sounded, and a dot of light glowed on Karry’s wrist. 

The artificial limb had included a few extra features, and the miniature computer was one of them. As Karry tapped the light, a small holoprojector pulled up the ship’s map that Websin had sent, with the route to the blister highlighted in green. “You can go yourself if you want. The servitor will remain here.”

“Really??” Karry grinned widely. The two AI’s hadn’t let her go anywhere ‘by herself’ out of worry that something would trigger a panic attack, but maybe they thought that something like the regular trips to the blister would be easy enough for Karry to handle herself without an episode. Or they were finally pulling back the somewhat-patchy cotton balls they had kept around her: no babysitter or foster parent back on Earth would have let her around weapons! 

But the two AI’s had been sure, after the (slightly) embarrassing episode of her first two nights on the outpost, to make sure that she knew exactly how to get out of a room, where to go for food, and how to get places, usually by having a cleaning remote or servitor follow her around like a puppy. And even though the route was clearly marked, and they could follow her using the ship’s camera’s, she could use this opportunity to explore the ship a little.

Provided a panic attack didn’t set in, of course. 

“On my way!” She grinned, closing the map and heading for the doors, “’See’ you there!”

~

The massive craft, large enough to embark several Bolos and an entire armored assault battalion of Manticorian Marines and almost a kilometer and a half long, leveled its fiery descent smoothly, incandescent gases dissipating and outer plating cooling slowly in the moist forest air. Karry watched as the sky, at first brightened by the Websin’s passage from star scattered darkness to white flame settled into a deep lightening blue, and the land below drew up. The massive trees of the planet’s forest, stretching to the horizon, drew closer, and Karry gasped as what had at first seemed like larger trees, then hills came into closer view.

Massive towers covered in vines and foliage, emerged from the greenery. Several of their number had collapsed, weather from water or weather Karry could not tell, but their brothers stood still, like mountains. As the Websin closed, their true scale dawned on her, because they towered far above them, creating a canyon as the cities’ former highways and parks. They were so large, each could have been a city of its own. 

“This is nothing like home,” Karry whispered, eyes wide at the sight through the glass. 

“And what was home like?” Mark’s voice was just a quiet, as if to lend the towers more majesty. 

“A city called New York,” Karry replied. “So many people, I felt lost just wandering the streets.” She shook her head. “Sure we had skyscrapers, the Empire State or the Freedom Tower, and Central Park, but...” She marveled at the sight again. “Nothing like this. If it wasn’t green, it was grey, and some places you could never see the sun, or even trees. But this, it just dwarfs it.” The towers rose above them now, and Karry leaned into the outwardly domed glass, trying to look ahead. “Its just... incredible.”

“That it is,” Mark replied. “That it is.” 

The Websin slowly glided over what was probably the only maintained green in the city, a well manicured ‘lawn’, covered in many places in what looked like little grey bushes or clumps of grasses... but only around the leviathan bulks of at least three other Bolos, their massive turrets pointed away from the troop ship. Other, smaller machines dotted their decks, and grouped among the plants below as the ship settled in an oddly clear section of the field, and Karry sighed. Time to go and met the hosts, she thought. 

~

The landing bay doors slowly, if loudly, opened, and Karry felt very self conscious walking down the vast ramp next to something - or someone - as large as Mark. But he didn’t move til she did, matching her slow walk down with the quite turn of massive treads. But at the bottom, Karry paused, blinking in the bright sunlight and shivering slightly in the slight chill of what was apparently mid morning, and stared at the group that had approached to greet her. 

The first group was fairly normal... if normal meant eight limbs with various attachments and tools or hands or other manipulating appendages and oddly faceted ‘heads’. The ‘robots’ or what ever must have been closely designed from the Manticorian body itself, with two pairs of dog-like legs set one after another, and two wildly disproportionate pairs of arms on a wide torso covered in some sort of ceremonial robe. This group seemed to have its attention split between her and the other group, however, which to Karry seemed far from normal.

The second group was, in fact, the little grey ‘clumps’ she had seen from the blister, but were definitely not plants. If anything, they looked like cats, if cats had six legs, not four, and if they had hands, and if they did not seem to be staring at her as if she was a moon. She, of course stared back. 

For a second, nothing happened. Mark had paused when she did, and the field was silent except for the wind, and then...

A single cat-thing began trotting slowly toward Karry, crossing the distance before coming to a stop at her feet. It sat there fore a second, staring into her eyes while siting back on it’d hind limbs and brushing its whiskers with it’s four fingered hand-paws. Almost unthinkingly, she knelt down and looked closer, wondering how something so alien could look so similar, and so friendly. And then, the little thing stopped cleaning it’s whiskers, and slowly reached a hand - it was definitely a hand - to touch her on the cheek. She let it, reaching up to cup its hand in hers, and it crooned to her, bringing up the other hand to reach around her neck, and unthinkingly, she scooped up the little critter and carefully squeezed it back, as the little body began buzzing in an unmistakable purr. For a moment, she closed her eyes and enjoyed the nearly human contact, before opening her eyes to find almost another hundred others surrounding her and crooning with the one in her arms, as if they were welcoming her to their home. 

“I see we do not need to make too much of an introduction,” Mark’s voice rose over the sound of the creature’s crooning. “They don’t seem to need one.”

~~~

So ends part five. If any of you have read David Weber’s Honorverse, you may recognize the treecats (link here http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/Treecat ) of his work. Awesome little things. 

Be preapared for tomorrow, I hope, where part six comes in. Provided Christmas doesn’t take up too much of my time. 

See you then!

[xt1erminator-blog]

My History With D&D: How I Got Started

This should have been my introductory post on this blog, but, lazy.

It was a dark and stormy night.

No really, it was a dark and stormy night. I'm not just pretending to be Snoopy writing a novel. Anyhow, I recall being over at an elementary school friend's house for a sleep over I believe. Must have been 10 or 11 years old. There were three or four of us, and my friend, we'll call him Willy, was Dungeon Master. I had no actual playing experience before this night (the only time I had run into this strange game was several years earlier when I was over at the neighbour's house and their much older teenage kids were sitting around the kitchen table with their friends, the table cluttered with big books and weird shaped pieces of plastic and small metal figurines, and bottles and cans of pop and chips and all sorts of delicious looking junk food... it was similar to that scene in E.T. where the kids are playing D&D [not the photo above! - that’s from Freaks & Geeks] except it was daytime). And here I was now, sitting in a camper trailer in the middle of a big thunder/rain storm being shown how to make something called a "character". I have no recollection what race or class this character was, or his name.  I do remember though that he used a mace as his weapon and wore chainmail, and had iron rations. Maybe he was a cleric. I think it was red box Basic D&D we were playing.

I think I might have played a total of two or three games at Willy's place. Mostly with the same other friends playing it each time. The last game we played was using the 1st Edition AD&D rule books, and it was way over my head at the time. I remember stealing money from my paper route collections (which were probably due at the end of the week) and buying my own red box Basic D&D set and some dice, and I played the solo adventure for awhile (damn rust monster!) and then just hid out in the basement with a stack of graph paper, and drew out dungeon after dungeon after dungeon. They all sucked, I’m sure. I think the next major book purchase was the 2nd Edition Player's Handbook. And then the Monstrous Manual binder. Man, I hated that binder. What an awful format. I mean, great for organizing, being able to take out monster sheets and add in new ones, etc. but functionality-wise, it was a disaster. The binder didn't sit well with the other books on a shelf and whatever lamination they used for the exterior of the cover got very scuffed up if you put it in a backpack and it looked like ass in no time flat. The good old days. I would borrow other books and modules from anyone who was willing to let me take them away from them for any length of time, and sit there and read parts of them, mostly paying attention to the cool maps and the artwork. I remember photocopying many a module at the public library too.

So for several years after, I would mostly just read the books, and Dragon and Dungeon magazines, and attempt to create my own maps and even once or twice spent some money on miniatures and tried to paint them. Massive fail. If I would have know that the Ral Partha Forgotten Realms Heroes miniatures set I bought for $15 back in the late 80's/early 90's (whenever it was) would be worth hundreds of dollars almost 30 years later, I would have taken greater care with how much primer I carelessly sprayed on to those poor little figures, getting the shit all over my dad’s workshop tool bench (sorry Wulfgar, Drizzt, Dragonbait, Alias, etc.!) and how much paint I recklessly slapped on to them thinking I was doing things right. Ouch.

I tend to ramble so I'll try to summarize everything else up until now with a bit less detail. After elementary school came high school and there wasn't a lot of action when it came to playing Dungeons & Dragons, well with cool people I mean. There was a small group at the first high school I attended, that would play a game in the art room in the lower level of the school. I sat in once, maybe twice, to check it out. Wasn't my bag. These were the stereotypical super geeky, taped-up-eyeglasses nerds that were more interested in dissecting the rules and not playing with any real imagination it seemed. They were kind of like robots. Plus, not very fun when you have 45 minutes for a lunch break to try and make any progress in an adventure. I heard about others in this school who played, but I was never invited to go play in anyone's campaign. I stopped in a few times to see what was going on with another friend's home game, but didn't end up playing because they were a little too into roleplaying. Most of the playing I did happened later in my teenage years when I ended up playing in late night sessions with some older seniors at another school I went to, and then some games here and there with a bunch of fellows who have since turned out to be what you might call "life long friends". The good guys. Then, in my early 20's, I was the first of anyone I knew to do something incredibly stupid: meet a girl on the internet (1997), marry her and move to another country.

From that point on, I guess I lost interest in the hobby. I had always wanted to run my own game, but no opportunities ever arose, or I didn't have anywhere to play or I was just too on edge to be able to compose myself if a game were to actually take formation. I spent a lot of my time learning how to play musical instruments and often partied. Often. I don't regret it, those were some of the best times I've had. Years passed and I really didn't think about D&D or playing any sort of table top game at all. I grew more fond of digital entertainment, PC games, console games, etc.  I ended up attempting to become somewhat of a "photographer", and after many years I think I'm happy with where I am at with that particular hobby. It was one of those things you never thought to pursue and then one day, you end up spending several hundred dollars on a friend's used DSLR body and a strange, big zoom lens you have no clue how to use properly.

After almost six years and a "should have seen that one coming" style divorce, I returned back home and was again surrounded by my long time friends. It took a little bit of adjustment to get back into the circle with everyone - just picking up and leaving the country when you're 22 years old and supposed to be starting to explore your options for a career and everything, can kind of make a mess of your social connections.  I ended up getting back on my feet pretty quickly though, and found work a month and a half after coming home. I'm still there actually, almost 15 years later.

So, how did I reconnect with my beloved hobby?  It was almost two years ago or so (summer of 2015, I don't know if Tumblr dates these blog posts, I don't think so). My wife's step brothers had asked if she knew anyone who had ever played Dungeons & Dragons. She mentioned to them that I did. She asked on their behalf if I would run a game for them, they were curious and hadn't played before. I declined, no way no how. Been out of touch with it for years. Didn't play anymore. Made up some excuses. Left it at that. I had never run my own games before and had no confidence that I could be very effective when trying to introduce newcomers in to the game.

Then, at the end of that summer, another opportunity arose. Some mutual friends/family expressed interest in trying out the new 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. They had been watching Critical Role online and somehow it came up in discussion.  I had spent the last few months recalling my love for the game from my past, and ended up being much more receptive to the idea. I was much older, had been through a lot of situations in my life where things like social interaction was easier for me to become comfortable with, and I was developing a passion for it again, it seemed. After downloading the free basic 5e rules, and researching some things on YouTube, I was all for it. Our first session was on my 39th birthday at the beginning of October, 2015. It has snowballed into an addiction since then. I have invested a lot of my time (and money) into a small collection of books and miniatures, and some writing to fuel a small Forgotten Realms campaign. We don't play often, maybe every month and a half to two months, as it depends heavily on my wife's work schedule and when she can book a weekend off. I don't like playing on weekday evenings, as I'm usually pretty burned out from work or there just isn't much time to get into a good game before having to cut it short because people have to work the next day.

My Forgotten Realms campaign, currently one of two games I run, started out with three characters: a dwarven sorcerer, a half-orc druid and a gnome rogue. For the first session or two, I attempted to incorporate a PC that I was playing, a cleric of Bane. His appearance was very brief, as I decided it was not going to work well, playing a character while trying to hold down the fort being Dungeon Master and running the show. I'm not at that stage yet. So, I sent the cleric off in the night to go tend to an important mission while the rest of the party carried on. I used the majority of the 5e Starter Set module, Lost Mine of Phandelver. It did the job. I twisted it up a bit and definitely didn't follow it as per the booklet, and I still do that to this day. My style when using pre-written adventures, it seems, is to grab bits and pieces that are essential, and do the rest on the fly and change as necessary based on what the players may do to throw things off. And that's a good thing. It's helping me build skills to become a better Dungeon Master that can adapt to different scenarios, because it almost always doesn't go the way you plan it will go. I learned that early on. After a few months of playing and completing the Wave Echo Cave area, a situation arose that brought the party through a portal leading to the entrance to the Undermountain dungeon, located underneath The Yawning Portal in the great city of Waterdeep. This was an opportune moment to introduce a new player to the group, which happened thanks to a spur of the moment idea I had, to invite an old friend who I knew was a fan of what we were doing. I wasn't sure if he was up for joining the group, but you don't know until you ask, right? The next session, without saying too much of anything, the door bell rang and moments later the group now had a paladin amongst their ranks. It's been a way better game since.

The second campaign I'm going to start running over the next few weeks will be based upon the Eberron setting, which up until last week I had personally shrugged off any time it came up in my travels, and had no interest in even reading what it was about. I'm not sure why that is, I think the brief encounters I had with it previously were based on flipping through some 3rd Edition books, and I just wasn't picking up on what it was all about. I have never been much into anything 3e, the look and design of the books are unappealing to me. This past week though, one of my players and I got ahold of the 4th Edition Eberron Campaign and Player's guides, and I started reading them. I am really liking the setting and am looking forward to trying to use it in a new game. Lightning Rails, Airships, Warforged, Shifters, Dragonmarks - very cool stuff!  Also of help here was a video on Nerdarchy’s YouTube channel where the guys discuss 10 Reasons Why 5th Edition Needs Eberron

This leads to my next post: What Might Eberron For 5e Be Like?

Coming soon!

-runDMsteve

[gregwhite]

GRATITUDE IN WRITING

Please pardon me for being the millionth person to bring up gratitude in LA this year. Gratitude is having something of a moment you might say. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but by the 10th time you see it used to sell green juice in Venice you start to get a little white person wary. But it makes me think about something crucial to sustaining a career in this or any industry.

Last night I was delighted to do a talk with a class of BU students* who are here doing a semester in various entertainment industry jobs while learning about how this town works and etc etc and I brought something up to them that I’d like to share here.

I finished college in 2006 and decided, being from Jersey, that I would get my start in New York before riding triumphant to LA. I had always been told, “if you want to work in TV, move to LA,” but that was too frightening to contemplate and so HA I thought. HA IN YOUR FACE. So NYC it was**. I got a job as a page at Letterman, and when that ended I was a temp at HBO, and when that ended (after a day) I got a job as a prep cook/PA on a PBS cooking show (which was pretty outstanding) and when that ended I got a job in my friend’s wine store in Tappan, NY, the Grape d’Vine (currently relocated to Sparkill, NY). Also I was unemployed a lot. 

And when you’re ambitious and also uncertain about the path forward, the only boot in the ass you need is the one that comes with being unemployed a year out of college, living in your childhood bedroom (it’s a great bedroom actually), while your little sister finishes college up in Boston and your other friends move into the city. (It also compels you to write a lot.) So it was with that in mind that I moved here in January of 2008. 

So back to gratitude. I won’t go into the whole thing now, but basically, during the year and change I was living at home in NJ before I moved here, my rule was (I like rules) that I had to email 10 BU alumni every day asking them if I could buy them a coffee (if they were in NY) to talk to them about how they got their start and if they were in LA, if I could just give them a call and talk to them. So people are generally really nice and open and happy to share their experiences (aka talk about themselves) and by the time I made the very scary move to LA, I had actually amassed a nice little group of contacts who said that if I ever moved to LA, they would be happy to meet with me. 

And in this way, I ended up meeting with fancy writers, and network execs, and studio heads and all kinds of people. And one of them was a BU alum named Debbie Liebling, and she was very encouraging and sweet (and even let me pitch a feature to her, which was a DISASTER because I figured I could just wing it in the room...it still makes me nauseous to think of that) and at the end of our meeting, she mentioned another friend of hers from her time at Comedy Central named Zoe Friedman. I met up with Zoe at her office at Comedy Central and we had a memorably enjoyable conversation about what I hoped to do, and our time on the east coast (she was a New Yorker), and before long a friendship developed, one that I was and still am very grateful for in its openness and kindness. 

At the same time I was doing a bunch of random jobs as one does in their early days of LA. I was a PA on a Comedy Central show called Lil Bush, run by a very nice man (and BU alum) named Donick Cary, and I was, most depressingly, a temp at Sony filing legal affairs paperwork, which meant that I would spend by mornings writing scripts I wasn’t sure anyone would ever read, go to work filing PILOT DEAL PAPERWORK FROM FANCY WRITERS, and then go home and continue writing. It was frustrating in one sense, but also highly motivating, and I think in that first year in LA, I must have written 10 pilots.

Anyway, this is getting long, which was not my intention. 

Long story short, I end up working for Zoe’s dad Budd, legendary founder of the Improv, and thank god for that job because I needed one (again, thank you Zoe). The job was basically helping Budd book acts for the Improv’s casino sites, and while booking comics wasn’t my goal in moving to LA, it was fun, put me in touch with some very lively characters, and also allowed me time to write during quiet spells throughout the day. It was during my time working for Budd that I received an email from someone at Comedy Central informing me that a showrunner for a new show had read something of mine and wanted to meet and would I like to set up a time?

I had to read the email a few times, because (a) the words seemed Nigerian Prince levels of too good to be true, and (b) because these kinds of emails often have a weird subject format which looks like MTG TO SET: GREG WHITE WITH _____ and I assumed it was a spambot trying to get me to sign up for a credit card. I emailed back informing them that yes I would love to meet with the showrunner but um, let me just check my sched--okay, checked it, yeah anytime is fine. But I also asked how this guy had even gotten a script of mine, and the response was that Zoe had submitted a script on my behalf. One of those scripts I was writing at home in NJ after college.

So very long story short, I met with the showrunner, a fellow named David M Stern, and within a week I was writing on my first show as a real life TV writer. (Thanks, David.)

But the point of this is gratitude. Nobody anywhere is self-made. Sure, you work hard and you hope to get a shot, but like Obama said during the debates in 2012, “you didn’t build that.” If you have a trucking company, guess what, you benefit from the public works programs that built the highways that allow you to run your company. And if you’re a writer, there are a million gatekeepers and the walls are way too high to jump over on your own. You need help. That isn’t to say this isn’t a meritocratic town, because to an extent it is, and so if you keep working and writing and trying to get your stuff in front of people, eventually something will fall your way because you refuse to stop until that something does, but...you’re not self-made. And realizing this is the key to sustaining a happy and healthy and productive career (and life) in the arts. You are a product of everyone who has ever said something encouraging, or given you an idea, or played you a song, or made a phone call on your behalf. Your career is a balance sheet on the amount of kindness you’ve received, whether it was deserved or not. And the way you can try and deserve that kindness, is by not being a dick about it. Acknowledge that, and you’ll be very glad you did.  

Let’s just consider this for a second. David had gotten a show to series, itself a small miracle. And he had read probably hundreds of scripts and certainly wasn’t asking for Zoe to send him one from some random guy from New Jersey. And it’s not like Zoe needed to submit me. And it wasn’t like David needed to even bother reading me. And that he liked it? And wanted to meet with me? And hire me? Consider all of the things that had to happen for me to get my first job, a foot in the door. Such tiny odds. Now, if you’re an insane person you go, YES THE ODDS WERE SMALL AND I VANQUISHED THEM! But if you’re a normal functioning human, you go, Jesus God, that almost didn’t happen, and hug the things you’re grateful for a little tighter and whisper THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU (just don’t do this on a bus or in public). Seriously, consider that. The good things in your life almost didn’t happen, and it is basically just weird luck that it did. Be grateful for the random accounting error that is your life. In fact, consider anything you love in life...and now consider that thing removed from your life. Kinda sucks, right? Exactly. You fall into a routine and you complain about something dumb and you forget about the fact that your entire life is pretty much full of glorious things that, taken on their own in a vacuum, appear to be miracles. But taken collectively they become the things most people don’t even look at. (Not to get all Pete Holmes-meets-Eliza here, but seriously. Don’t forget how lucky you are to be alive right now.)

I called Zoe to thank her the day I got that email, and I called her to thank her when I met with David, and I called her to thank her when I got the job, and I called her to thank her when I got my second job, and to this day, I still email her when something goes my way. Sold a pilot? Thank Zoe. Wrapped season 2 on a show? Thank Zoe. And not only Zoe, but my high school film teacher for showing me this was a thing I could do and was good at. And my mom and dad. And the friend who invited me to join the writers workshop when I first moved out here. And so on. And more than just this being the right way to live, it also feels really good. Your gratitude connects you to these people and reminds you that you’re never alone, that you carry in your body all the good things that ever happened to you and the more you acknowledge those good things, the more they stay alive. And of course, if ever you see yourself ten years ago in a newly-arrived LA human, you do what you can do show them kindness because in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins.

So I guess my point is, whether you’re just starting out or many years into a career, you’ve got someone to be grateful for, and I hope you let them know it. It’ll make you a better person, and that will make you a better writer. 

*I also went to BU, class of 06, but did not do this LA program as (a) it seemed insane to pay a semester of college tuition to come intern and (b) I REALLY love Boston and (b) I REALLY liked being in college and taking classes. They told me I couldn’t take more than 5 per semester, so I just started showing up to classes I wasn’t enrolled in and waited for someone to kick me out. They never did. Goddamn, I loved being a full-time student. I always say that if I ever become grossly wealthy I’m going to grad school to get a masters degree in something useless. Basically for me college was going to lectures and talks and film screenings and making our late night talk show with my friends. Actually, it’s not very different from my life now, only I own more kettlebells. 

**It was not glamorous per se. I would take the bus from Harrington Park NJ to the Port Authority daily and then back. Gross. But NYC is lovely in the fall and spring and a nightmare in the winter and summer and I loved working there, even if it was as a page for $270 a week. 

[placetobenation]

BACK TO THE THEATER..OR NOT

So movies are trying to claw their way back into theaters, and I for one am all for it. I don’t want to be a prisoner of this virus until vaccines are created and distributed. Wonder Woman 1984 has set a new date to be released this Christmas, 2020, and I get the feeling that some other big blockbusters will be jointing her.

So many summer blockbusters were shelved, we are definitely going to be having our pick of the liter when things open up again. I think the theater business will be booming for quite a while. 

For the movies that have been released, like Mulan and Tenet – the news is good and bad. Mulan was released in America through Disney+, but it was released in China to the theaters. China is the second biggest draw for movies after the USA, so Disney was hopeful to make money on both ends, and see which one came out on top. So far, for Mulan, it looks like a tie. 

Streamer usually pay off about 25 – 30 million for a movie for a restricted viewing experience. Mulan made less then that in it’s opening weekend in China. China box office came out to be around 20 million in it’s first three days in theaters. Now will it make more, sure – but the number will surely drop and it’s not going to get dramatically higher in any sense. The final prediction for Mulan in China is about 40 million over all. Not great, but then again, this is not America. Should Disney have waited? Well their slate is kind of full of movies already waiting, so maybe this is the one they decided to test the waters with, who knows. It was a gamble and it was not a complete disaster, but it wasn’t exactly a success either. 

Tenet is another movie that is being tested. Christopher Nolan is all high and mighty with his films and he always dresses and suits and he never lets people sit down and blah blah. Well Warner Bros and Sony are keeping the film’s numbers a secret. 

Apparently they are not releasing numbers by the day, but rather by the week, so no one knows if Tenet is slumping, staying the course or increasing. I’m sure they wish to keep the shroud of excellence wrapped around Nolan for as long as possible – but industry insiders say Tenet maybe falling and falling hard. 

NFL DIPS AND DABS

The NFL saw a dip in their ratings this week – down about 13 percent from last year’s opening kickoff game. Researchers say there is nothing to worry about – since NBA, NHL, and US Open are all happening at the same time, and MLB is about to go into their playoffs – fans have a lot more sports than they can handle right now. 

BRUISED TERRIFFIED HALLE BERRY

The gorgeous and talented Halle Berry has made her directorial debut with a movie called Bruised that is making it’s world premiere in the Toronto Film Festival. “I was scared shitless. And if you’re not having any sense of worry, I don’t think you care, I don’t think you want to do your very best” Halle said to reporters. 

In Bruised, Berry plays a disgraced MMA fighter, Jackie “Justice,” who has to conquer her own demons and face one of the fiercest rising stars of the MMA world to become the mother that she thinks her son Manny deserves. That role isn’t the first dark horse character that Berry has played during her Hollywood career, which includes her Oscar-winning role of Leticia Musgrove, a dirt-poor widow, in Monster’s Ball.

“You know I’m always most drawn to characters who are fractured, broken, who are fighting to survive. Every time I get to play those roles, I get to have a cathartic experience and I get to have some healing for myself,” Berry explained.Despite the cachet an Academy Award trophy brought to her Hollywood career, Berry says there’s sadness in not seeing other Black women follow her and win the industry’s biggest best actress prize. “Every time when Oscar time comes round, I get reflective and I think maybe this year, maybe this year, and it’s heartbreaking that other women haven’t stood there,” she revealed.

BILL MAHR BACK IN STUDIO

Bill Mahr is moving from his backyard and headed back into his studio for the first time in months. “There’s real people. Thank you jesus. Thank You People!!” he exclaimed. The show is filmed in CBS Television City’s Studio 33. HBO is bring back only 25 people for now, to be in the audience, but Bill says that will be loud enough. “This is interesting, you can hear people laugh individually.” The host said.

QUENTIN TARANTINO VS BRUCE LEE

Jason Scott Lee has become the foremost expert on the immortal Bruce Lee and has spoken out, as so many have, on how Quentin Tarantino decided to portray the martial arts legend. 

Jason is known for being the boy in Jungle Book, for playing Bruce Lee in Dragon and currently the villain in the new rendition of Mulan. When confronted about what he thought about Tarantino’s Bruce Lee fighting Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – he certainly had a strong opinion about it. 

One of Lee’s most memorable roles is that of the aforementioned Bruce Lee in 1993’s Dragon, which is based on the book by Bruce’s widow, Linda Lee Cadwell. Since he did rigorous martial arts training with Bruce’s former student Jerry Poteet, Lee developed even more respect for the revered martial artist he was playing. So, needless to say, Lee, like Bruce’s daughter, Shannon, wasn’t too pleased with Quentin Tarantino’s portrayal of Bruce in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

“While I was training [to play Bruce Lee], I started learning his system of fighting and actually feeling the motions that he taught his students. I realized so much about the precision and the discipline of a person like that, and that’s why it was very hard for me to watch that scene with Mike Moh portraying Bruce,” Lee admits. “Granted, Mike’s a great actor, but I think being put in that position to portray Bruce Lee that way was really hard to take. I kind of winced. Yeah, he was boastful, but he was one of those guys that could back it up. He wasn’t challenging that way, you know? So [Tarantino] took a lot of creative leeway in presenting Bruce Lee in that manner, and he got a lot of flack for it. And it’s not justified the way he did it.”

Lee also mentions that Poteet, who became his longtime sifu after Dragon, would have objected to Tarantino’s depiction since he had a close master-apprentice relationship with Bruce.

“My sifu, Jerry Poteet, who was a student of Bruce, has since passed away, but I know he would be rolling over in his grave,” Lee explains. “He had direct association through a long term teacher-student relationship with Bruce… So, through the years of knowing Jerry and hearing all the stories and details, I’m sure it would’ve pissed him off.”

This scene will not just go away. Like I have said before, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is a love story between Tarantino and Brad Pitt. Tarantino wrote the most amazing, awe inspiring, coolest character for Brad and even made him beat up Bruce Lee. Cmon. We all know a washed up stunt man could never ever even touch Bruce Lee in his prime while he was filming Green Hornet. I think everyone is realizing this now and really taking offense to it. If Tarantino made the martial arts character anyone else in the world, but Bruce Lee – it would have been fine. Bruce Lee took his fighting extremely serious and like Jason said, he boasted, but he always backed it up – the guy was a certified martial arts champion and revolutionary. Anyway – don’t get me started. I’m glad the professionals agree with me as well on this. Tarantino went a bit overboard in his cinematic love letter to Brad Pitt.

THE END OF THE KARDASHIANS

Yes after 20 blissful years on the E Network, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” is airing it’s final season in early 2021. The choice was made by the family and announced recently. “It is with heavy hearts that we say goodbye to ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians,’” the famous family said in a joint statement, signed by Kris Jenner, Kourtney Kardashian, Khloé Kardashian, Kim, Rob Kardashian, Kendall Jenner, Kylie Jenner and Scott Disick.

“After what will be 14 years, 20 seasons, hundreds of episodes and several spin-off shows, we’ve decided as a family to end this very special journey. We are beyond grateful to all of you who’ve watched us for all of these years — through the good times, the bad times, the happiness, the tears, and the many relationships and children. We’ll forever cherish the wonderful memories and countless people we’ve met along the way.”

20 years is a lot. I mean, a lot. Hopefully this will end Kanye West’s craziness and Kim’s craziness and all the other crap that happens with this family. I mean let’s face it, they weren’t a bunch of intellectuals. They have so many sources of income the show’s salary probably became their lunch money by now. This kind of reality show was a guilty pleasure and really wasn’t doing society any bit of good. Kanye got a God complex, and Kim thought she could be a lawyer of all things.

I am glad this is ending, America has been in a weird kind of fantasy state and had rejected reality for too long. Problem is, someone like Paris Hilton will probably step in and take their place. 

Catch me here every Thursday. Have a great week!  @paulieb2003

[zipgrowth]

What Building a Tiny Home for the Homeless Taught My Students About Teamwork

Allow me a moment to brag about my students. During a recent bout of snow flurries, every single one of my students was outside helping hammer out some last-minute details on the tiny home we were building. Throughout the course of the project, all sixteen of my students had demonstrated resilience and adaptability.

Once during the build, Joey had finished putting up a wall in the middle of downpour, hustling to put the final pieces together even while drenched. Diego had demanded another shot at his work after the first attempt was, by his own admission, a disaster. Alex pulled me aside, frustrated that he wasn't on the same page as the rest of his team. Sean's refined presentation in front of several professionals demonstrated his hours of preparation. Dylan once stood up and proclaimed, “I'm not doing anything. How can I help?” Philip, after standing back and watching his teammates work for the better part of class, rallied to lead eight other classmates in lifting a major element of our work that each and every one of us applauded once complete.

My students don’t always work so collaboratively—they are ninth graders, after all, and are accustomed to working on individual assignments for the benefit of their own grades. But something about this project pulled them together. They weren’t completing an assignment for a grade, but building something for real people. And that meant it had to be good.

I teach a course called Architecture & Design in the new upper school for boys at Annie Wright Schools in Tacoma, Wash. Traditionally, Annie Wright’s high school had been all girls. After we opened a parallel all boys high school, we launched the class to help galvanize our new learning community. We wanted students to understand how to make spaces for others as they share a space with one another, and we wanted to provide an experience where they set their learning at the service of something greater than themselves.

Our work culminates in a design-slash-build of a tiny house that, when completed, will be delivered to one of the Nickelsville sites in Seattle, which provide housing for people experiencing homelessness. While Nickelsvilles started as collections of tents in fenced-in areas, the last eight years has seen an increase in the amount of tiny homes that keep residents safe, warm and dry.

The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), based in Seattle, provides the land and coordinates service providers. LIHI is one of our key partners in the project, as well as my mentors at Sawhorse Revolution, an incredible organization that provides opportunities for high school students to design and build tiny homes. (We also are grateful for manufacturers such as Milgard and Absher Construction for the materials they provided, and for the architects at Mithun and Wren & Willow for their guidance on our work.)

The tiny home students end up building isn’t exactly like the ones you may have seen on TV or in magazines. By the time we hand it off to LIHI, it isn’t (yet) wired for electricity and won’t include indoor plumbing. At nine-by-three feet, it’s also, well, tiny, meaning students have to get creative about how to arrange storage, sleeping and community areas, along with concerns such as whether they can include enough elements to house a small family and how they can create accessibility for the range of physical abilities future residents might hold.

Students sketch out the tiny homes using CAD software.

In the first two months of the course, we learn skills, concepts and mindsets related to architecture and design. We perform site visits to interview residents and study examples of houses already placed in Nickelsville. We sketch and draft our designs before rendering them in CAD software, which is used by architects and engineers. We perform critiques of each others’ work, learning how to offer and accept feedback from our classmates and from professional architects, and how we can iterate our designs based on that feedback. In the last three months of the course, we hold class in a parking lot, learning the carpentry skills necessary to construct the house, along with the furniture we designed for the interior.

Most importantly, though, we learn to see ourselves as designers and builders, as individuals who can understand a problem in the world and work together to build enough skills over a five-month period to help realize a solution to that problem. The experience is as much a lesson in leadership and collaboration as it is in design, and we create intentional opportunities to cultivate each of our students’ abilities to lead various parts of the project. The goal is to get them to realize the impact we make when we work on something greater than ourselves.

Make Space

Our classroom is a mess. We're surrounded by nail guns, power saws, tool carts, sawhorses and a variety of power cables and air tubes. 2x6s and sheets of plywood are regularly hefted around the job site. Sometimes, a blowtorch churrs in one corner as we burn siding using the shou sugi ban technique to create a charred finish. Kindergarteners, teachers and other visitors are constantly stopping by to chat with us about our work. Without care, the environment can be distracting and dangerous, and between myself and our master carpenter, Karl Stromvall, there are two adults facilitating the work of 16 students.

Teams of students are asked to complete tasks they have little, if any, familiarity with beyond the short instructions we provide. Sometimes, the students succeed. Other times, they idle with confusion or waning motivation. At times, they make mistakes and must decide whether they should disassemble their work right away or make adjustments down the line.

In other words, our learning space is perfectly imperfect: We have enough supervision and expertise to guide the students to realize their goals, and the students have enough space to rise to challenges, encounter failure, encourage one another and stall out only to find a way over an obstacle and see a task to completion. It's how they react to any of these moments that helps instill the spirit of leadership and design in each of them.

Rapid, Frequent Feedback

Teaching in the messy, noisy space feels more like coaching than any project-based learning experience I have facilitated in more traditional classrooms. We're shouting encouragement amongst the clamor of tools, and we're moving from group to group, quickly demonstrating skills at the time of need, modeling a technique before asking a teammate to try it, and then moving on to another group.

When students seem to sputter, we huddle with them to demonstrate modes of feedback they can use with each other. It might be a quick opportunity for each teammate to express what they need to be successful. It might be “speed back,” or we might ask them to gesture a response to a prompt (“On the count of three, point to the person who's made the most positive impact today.”) And it might be an opportunity for a team to develop their soundtrack, something that inspires them and distills their work into a particular set of songs. Good feedback is often individual, such as a private conversation with a student who is worried his team is disengaged with him: What approaches might he try, and what role could he fill?

Cultivating Reflection

Throughout the build, my students create a portfolio that reflects their work. This contains early sketches, notes about site visits, images that helped inspire their designs and a photoessay of the elements they personally made that had an impact on the build. I collect these several times over the course of the semester, providing written feedback but also making notes on who to connect with during our build sessions.

During the project, I ask them to reflect on questions that might help them develop their sense of purpose:

What qualities do you bring to your team that are utterly unique?

Give yourself a nickname that represents the role you fill on your team. Explain why.

Which classmate would you like to offer a shout out to for their work?

What could you change about your work to become a better teammate?

Each of our three class meetings a week starts and begins with a spirit circle, an opportunity for me to celebrate major contributions that I saw on the site, and a chance for students to note major contributions they saw. We take this opportunity to set goals, provide shout outs, joke around and celebrate both the mistakes we made and the remedies found.

(Image: Joe Romano)

In June, we'll gather around the build site, and each of us will have a chance to sit in the house and write one last reflection for our portfolios. We'll then watch as a truck wedges itself under our structure as it prepares to haul it off to a tiny home community.

Moments later, the house gone, we'll be left with a parking lot that looks the same as it did before we spent months turning a pile of lumber into a home. Are we better teammates and leaders? Was what we did unforgettable? Did we, in whatever tiny way, learn how to learn to make a tangible difference in the world? During that moment, my students look proud. For them at least, they have.

What Building a Tiny Home for the Homeless Taught My Students About Teamwork published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

[garynsmith]

A Top Producer’s Dream: JP and Associates REALTORS®

Paving the Way for Agent Success

For JP Piccinini, devising a concept for the ideal real estate company was easy. A former top-producing agent himself, he just thought about everything he would want from a brokerage firm…then built it himself. Clearly, Piccinini’s vision was on the money, as six short years later, Dallas-based JP and Associates REALTORS® (JPAR) has become home to 1,100 agents in 16 offices throughout Texas, an RISMedia Top 500 Power Broker, an INC5000 company with billions in sales, and expansion beyond state lines in the company’s not-so-distant future. The secret to the firm’s rapid growth? Productivity and service, says Piccinini. Find out more about the culture and mindset that drive the company’s success in this exclusive interview.

Maria Patterson: JP, please begin by telling us how you first got into the real estate business. JP Piccinini: I started in real estate in Columbia, S.C., at Russell and Jeffcoat REALTORS®, which was recently bought and rebranded as Coldwell Banker. I had been a project engineer and entered real estate cold turkey at 28 years old. I figured, what the heck—if it fails, I can go back to what I had been doing. But I wound up never looking back. I fell in love with the business. Real estate allowed me to help people, it allowed me to put deals together and it allowed me to run my own business by finally being the master of my own destiny—all the things I had been passionate about as an engineer could play into a real estate career. I wasn’t from Columbia, but I became Rookie of the Year, then the No. 1 agent in the office in year two. Shortly after, I became the No. 1 agent in the market for several years in a row before moving back to Texas.

MP: With that degree of success, why did you switch to the brokerage side? JP: I wanted a new challenge. You can say I learned at an early age that I was an entrepreneur at heart. I wanted to grow a company and help fellow agents with their business by seeing them succeed like I did, so I pursued my broker’s license. I also wanted to move my family back to Dallas—I’m from North Texas and went to school there.

In October 2011, instead of buying into a franchise model, I decided to do my own thing and opened JP and Associates REALTORS®. I designed the concept of the company on a barf bag while on an airplane. I put my REALTOR® cap on and thought, if I was to leave, what kind of brokerage would I wish for? What would I look for? I created the company from the viewpoint of a top producer—I drew up a formula that included 100-percent commission, the support of leadership, and all the technology and training that I wanted as an agent. This is how JP and Associates REALTORS® was born. I figured if I could get 20 or so agents, that’s all I would need to make it work. We started with three, which became 25, which became 75 then 150. Now, we’re 1,100 agents in 16 offices with a few billion dollars in sales behind us. I would be lying if I told you I thought we would be here today.

MP: That’s impressive growth! So what regions does your firm serve? JP: We are all over Texas, but predominantly in DFW, Austin, Houston and San Antonio. We had a little setback in Houston due to Hurricane Harvey (at press time), but it’s a very aggressive, very vibrant real estate market that will bounce back quickly. Both San Antonio and Houston are brand-new markets for us, and we’re looking to grow them as quickly as we did DFW and Austin.

MP: How would you describe your firm’s positioning in the marketplace? What sets you apart from the competition? JP: We’re focused on productivity and service. From a cultural standpoint, we’re different from most other brokerages out there because we don’t typically retain agents who haven’t sold six homes in 12 months, nor do we sponsor agents who have sold less than six homes in the last 12 months. We don’t hire part-time agents. We want to focus on agents who understand that real estate is a full-time career—agents who focus on productivity in their business and their responsibility to service the community. As leaders, we service agents and get involved in all levels within the brokerage. We believe in what Zig Ziglar said in the famous quote, “You can have everything you want in life as long as you help other people get what they want first.” That’s how JP and Associates REALTORS® started—we decided to give agents everything they wanted in a brokerage, and the rest just followed. Honestly, it’s gotten even better since the beginning. My job is to keep making this brokerage even better than it was yesterday.

MP: How would you describe current market conditions in your area? JP: It differs from market to market, but the Texas market has been extremely hot since 2011. Dallas, North Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin are all in the top 20 markets across the nation. Our numbers are up 60 percent from last year and 700 percent from 2013. Even with the natural disasters, the economy is still pointing to Texas to be a leader in job creation and real estate for years to come.

MP: What has been your approach to evolving and growing JPAR? JP: The company was designed for a top-producer mindset and attracting the right agents who have a passion for selling real estate. We’re about attracting agents who get our values and focus, without the ancillary distractions. They’re focused on one thing, and that’s selling real estate. “Exceeding expectations” is our tagline. There’s a secret in real estate: clients do business with agents because they like and trust them. Very few people choose an agent because of the brand they work for. While we built a brand people recognize, it’s all about the agents here. Agents first. Our management team strives to exceed our agents’ expectations, and agents, in turn, strive to exceed their clients’ expectations.

MP: What are the biggest challenges currently facing your firm and its agents? JP: When you’re opening offices as fast as you can and growing exponentially, talent acquisition is a challenge, not just in terms of agent count, but from a management standpoint. Attracting top talent to the management team is not easy, but we must attract management and staff to support our growth—put people in a key position to lead.

Another one of our biggest challenges is to expand to other states, which will be the focus in years to come with our licensing expansion efforts. Of course, those talented people we seek will be the key to our success.

MP: Where does the greatest opportunity for increased business lie? JP: Our biggest opportunity continues to be in Texas, of course. We want to capitalize on the other remaining areas of Texas and the 27 million residents who live here. We would also like to expand to New York, California, Florida and South Carolina; however, there are still billions of dollars in real estate marketshare to be had here in Texas, so we will continue to strive to be No. 1 in the Lone Star State for years to come. Shorter term, our goal is to be No. 1 in DFW by 2025. There—I went on record to say it…now it’s official! That’s a fun challenge, as we compete with some incredibly well-established brokerages.

MP: How will JPAR’s plan for expanding outside of Texas unfold? JP: We’ve hired a national expansion director, whose primary role is to drive expansion in other states. We get inquiries weekly from brokers who are interested in our model, and have begun the screening process. With the licensing model, brokers can own the brokerage and fly our flag without having to carry the overhead and deal with operational headaches all on their own like a franchisee would have to. We become partners—sweat and cash equity partners essentially. It’s a win-win for all parties. If anyone is interested, they can email USA@jpar.net for more details. We’re actively looking for broker/owners that want to join our journey.

MP: How are you attracting and retaining top agents? JP: JP and Associates REALTORS® has one of the highest retention rates in the industry—over 90 percent stay and thrive here. In an industry known for its turnover, we’re very pleased with those numbers—it proves we’re onto something with our model. Our productivity, our management team, our culture, the support, our offices, the tools and technology, the mentorship and training make it hard for agents to go anywhere else. We have a career development director whose sole responsibility is to manage and update the training curriculum. At any given time, there are multiple training sessions available to our agents. All those are just part of the support and services agents can expect from our brokerage. We’ve officially coined and proven the term “a full-service brokerage at a transaction-fee cost.” While there are several 100-percent commission brokerages out there, not many can say they’re a full-service brokerage with brick and mortar offices, training and everything else we offer.

MP: In your opinion, what is most critical to your firm’s success path forward? JP: We want to continue to attract great agents and continue to attract talent in management and staff. It’s also critical that we protect our culture of productivity and service. As we grow, we don’t want that to get diluted. I’m a scholar of other companies, and there are two companies I strive to emulate: Chick-fil-A and Southwest Airlines. They grew from 40 to 40,000 and managed to keep their culture intact.

MP: What’s in store for the future of JP and Associates REALTORS®? JP: We’re going to continue to expand in Texas and start claiming beachheads in other markets as we move into other states. We want to selectively acquire other brokerages that are of like kind for rapid expansion. That will help us continue to grow exponentially. We recently acquired Private Label Realty’s Texas assets and operations. It was our first acquisition. We’re looking to invest aggressively in other markets in the years to come by doing the same thing over and over as resources allow us to.

MP: What advice would you give to anyone wanting to start their own brokerage? JP: If your passion is to serve, lead and leave a legacy, go for it. But don’t do it for the money. Do it for the passion and thrill of being an entrepreneur. If you love selling homes, being a broker/owner is not for you. If you love building a business and helping others build their business—go for it.

MP: Finally, can you tell the audience a little trivia about yourself? JP: Oh wow, there’s lots of material out there! I always like to remind people, as we say in Texas, “I wasn’t born here, but I got here as fast as I could.” I immigrated to the U.S. from Italy at the age of 13. I was a freshman in high school and didn’t even speak English. I finally became an American citizen in 2016 after six different visas. If I can do it…you can, too.

For more information, please contact USA@jpar.net, or visit the corporate site at www.jpar.net.

Maria Patterson is RISMedia’s executive editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at maria@rismedia.com.

For the latest real estate news and trends, bookmark RISMedia.com.

The post A Top Producer’s Dream: JP and Associates REALTORS® appeared first on RISMedia.

from News | RISMedia http://ift.tt/2pioSc7 via IFTTT

[armorroofing]

Wow! Armor Roofing - The Best Edgerton MO Roofers

The article Wow! Armor Roofing - The Best Edgerton MO Roofers originally appeared on Armor Roofing Kansas City.

A house's roof is a necessary part of your property. For most people, a comfortable house will probably be their most significant long-term investment. A dwelling gives you the environment important to put in place a life with your family. But you need to first of all always ensure that your residential dwelling is certainly the optimal space for your loved ones to thrive. You have to take care that your household can be well maintained and there will not really end up being some unfortunate circumstance there that can make everybody become uneasy. It is normally thus important to insist on normal rooftop assessments to ensure that damage to your abode will not go undetected.

Because you reside in Edgerton, you should really grasp that the extreme climate there may significantly degrade your roof if suitable care is certainly not really appointed to it. As a consequence, when you recognize tale-tell hints of conceivable roofing deterioration such as asphalt shingles on the patio or yard or sharp dings on your AC and automobile, you will need to request an inspection of your roofing as early as possible to resolve any existing damages.

At Armor roofing, we have been roofing in the Edgerton locality for many years and we position buyer satisfaction above all else. This is one of the underlying factors we have many different five star ratings and testimonials written all across the top websites rating local businesses and hold an enviable perfect report with the local Better Business Bureau. We are certified roof examiners and can easily help you work with your insurance program to ensure you secure the most appropriate compensation for the roof work that is done. We ensure your full satisfaction. Pretty much all our quality service is protected by a 100% Armor guaranty on both materials and labor.

You must not allow an unseen roof shingle outflow get out of hand turning into a thorough housing disaster. Telephone us without delay for a free roof inspection.

Call Us Today!Call Us Today! (816) 331-7663

Speaking of roof maintenance, there are a good number of beneficial home maintenance problems the public may just forget about, and behind the majority of these, there will be solutions that will have to be completed to make sure that the rooftop will resist the hail when some kind of significant storm hits. A whole new roof replacement can sometimes be truly high priced, yet not ensuring it is handled fast is not at all highly recommended. You are not really going to share expenses with not quickly making sure it is resolved. Without resolving the damage caused, it will probably basically end up getting worse the minute a vicious rain develops, and effectively you will likely pay off much money. Remaining exposed to harsh weather conditions constantly, the rooftop will, in the end, require routine service, it is simply a mere matter concerning at what point.

The positive points are two fold. Initially, you must remember that most injuries can be fixed with a hassle-free and that is cost effective. Second of all, roofing repairs will often times be dealt with by your insurance provider. The difficulty is that they will only reimburse you as long as the contract is completed to their precise quality standards. This is the reason why you will have to make certain that the best-suited roof repair contractor actually does the roof repair properly initially. If not, you may be calling the roofer keep coming back to sort out the flaws your insurance company diagnosed.

So What Are Actually The Symptoms of Roof Decline?

To help you determine a rooftop's condition, there is a multitude of issues you absolutely need to handle dependent upon the special type of roof covering you have got:

Some Absolute Best Added Advantages Of A 100% New Roof Installation

In a case where you currently have a metal roof structure, perhaps you have spied any parts which may are deteriorated? You positively must have to chat to a trusted roofing professional to take a glance to determine just how dreadful the injury is. The place where you discover oxidation, there can be a tear, and that may be fairly horrible information for the dwelling.

Have roofing layer tiles shattered or fallen right off the household? You be needing to categorically exchange the chipped tiles and could actually need a full-blown roof replacement if the trouble is major.

How does the sarking layer underneath your roofing materials come across? Your sarking is the membrane underneath the roofing that creates reinforcement, some insulation, and a necessary rainwater barrier. A compromised sarking is roughly the same as wood decay. It perhaps might not just be extremely much time until finally, some portion of the roof top falls in on itself if that part is planned to provide backing, and most unfortunate, this scenario could perhaps develop in the not too distant future. In order to offer protection to your household from devastation, you ought to contemplate quick action to get your house fixed.

Discover any wood corrosion with regard to the roof working surface? Somebody should not need to become a physicist to know precisely this is normally a challenging issue. Lamentably, a little bit of rooftop service is undoubtedly in your family's future. As cited right above, any other lag time in having this handled could end up being negative to the asset.

A servicing or replacement is usually great if you have answered affirmatively to nearly any of the prior questions. The majority of people usually seek to contact a roofing expert who has in depth knowledge before trying to decide whether a roof covering patch up or replacement could very well be absolutely necessary. Understand that you will find there's no desire to start looking at the shingles on your own time to detect things. Numerous good roofers will provide you with full inspections without spending a penny, accordingly, you will not be compelled to go upon a roofing to survey for damage.

So just why leave your roof to chance? Make a call to Armor Roofing LLC today at (816) 331-7663 and our team will check out your roof structure at 100% no cost.

Call Us Today!Call Us Today! (816) 331-7663

The best thing you can do is to e-mail Roofs Are Us now for a pro bono inspection, and so you will not have a motive to undertake it your self. A roofing company like Armor Roofing LLC will impart to you a decent real sense as to regarding whether a patch up or full re-roof is vital. A 100% replacement must almost always be a path to take, specifically in a case where you would prefer to bite the bullet and modernize your roof top to a lifetime roof model that can elevate the building's market price tag and in addition, delaying long-term servicing. If or when the issues are serious enough it may well even be obligatory.

Why Would I Give Preference To A New Roof Installation?

Having a diligently substituted roof structure boasts a few noticeable benefits. This replacement involves your owning a whole new, tough, and exquisite roof top of the family house, therefore you will not have to freak out about it again and again. Obviously, if you do not want to switch out the complete roof covering, a roofing professional will be able to ensure that you have the requisite refurbishment and then you are set for a few years.

One other issue that obviously is looked into is whether or not you will sell your current home. Real estate masters believe that a really good roof structure is one thing which can potentially significantly grow the price tag of your household in the sight of a house purchaser.

Then Why Abstain From An Edgerton Fresh new Roofing Assembly?

It goes without saying, a roof structure replacing is, in fact, a more protracted and complex effort when compared to an improvement. You shouldn't be stressed about the job that much provided that you tap the services of the top contractor who has the operation practiced and perfected. Relating to the cost, five-thousand and ten-thousand dollars can be the overall band of price tags associated with a roof covering replacement. A colossal palace or advanced style tend to be drastically higher though compact homes will come down under this span. As mentioned earlier on, this can be most likely covered by your insurer, yet, strictly provided that the piece of work can be authorized up front and ended with the acceptable workmanship. Dial Armor to assist you, and we definitely will execute almost all that is fundamental to make it easier for you to pick up that reimbursement.

Provided that you do require a fantastic roofing professional next to Edgerton, contact us seriously at Armor Roofing LLC. Visit loads of positive summaries on the web provided that you will want to understand exactly how most of our clients say of our duty to superiority. Select the press button on the bottom level right position of the display area or contact (816) 331-7663 to look for the free roof inspection and an offer this afternoon!

Call Us Today!Call Us Today! (816) 331-7663

Armor Roofing LLC - Kansas City 6600 NW Tower Dr #104 Kansas City, MO 64151 (816) 935-9312 http://kansascity.roofsareus.com

The post Wow! Armor Roofing - The Best Edgerton MO Roofers appeared first on Armor Roofing Kansas City.

[excerptsfromunfinishednovels]

Excerpts From Unfinished Novels #2: Shift To The Beat Of Your Heart

Genre: horror/slice-of-life/thriller

Warnings: mild gore, mentions of blood

Word Count: 1,582

Excerpt is from the start of Part II of the novel.

It was meant to be Chloe’s first day of school, not the day the world went to hell.

She’d spent years, YEARS, gaining control of her abilities and taming her bloodlust, learning to control her body’s desire for transformation, to keep her movements smooth and natural, all so that she would finally be able to go out into the world. Her father Richard had done everything to try and dissuade her from the idea of going to school; he had been alive for over 150 years, he had multiple degrees, he could teach her anything she wanted. Chloe had had to patiently remind him again and again that it wasn’t about the learning, it was about the people.

Humans.

Chloe had read about them, had watched them from afar, but had never actually met one. There was something about them that was so fascinating; they were so physically weak and limited, and yet their minds…they were so full of creativity and ingenuity, shaping the world around them so that they could thrive. The books they read, the music and art they created, the technology they made, Chloe had absorbed it all throughout the early years of her life. At first, she had been content with her books, music, and recently, the internet, but now it wasn’t enough. Now she wanted the real deal; she wanted to delve into the world of humans first-hand – talk with them and listen to them, she wanted to get to know them. She loved her father, but since her mother had died when she was a baby it had been just him and her, and the occasional relative that came by to visit, and she was lonely and hungry for contact.

She’d argued and debated with Richard, hashing out the pros and cons of her going to high school, all of which boiled down to:

-          PRO: she would get to make new friends.

-          CON: she might reveal herself to the humans which would lead to either (a) them hurting/killing her, or (b) her hurting/killing/eating them.

Chloe hadn’t let up with her arguments though, and eventually her father had agreed that she could go to school once she’d been fully trained. This had led to ten human years of Chloe pushing her body and its abilities to its limit to ensure she could maintain a human form long-term. Once she had mastered this, they had taken mini-excursions to nearby towns, gradually increasing her proximity to the humans so she could learn to rein in her bloodlust in the face of their scent. There had been a few near-disasters but, for the most part, Chloe and her father were exceptionally proud of how developed her control was.

So now it was September. And Chloe was going to school.

She was in the kitchen, picking at her breakfast of deer heart and liver, her excitement causing her body to rapidly shift between forms.

“Honey, if you can’t control yourself here, how are you going to control yourself once you get into school?” Richard asked, looking over the morning paper.

Chloe swallowed a chunk of meat, quickly pulling herself into her human form. She smiled apologetically, and gave herself a once over to make sure she was completely stable, immediately zoning in on her right leg which would not stop twitching. She frowned down at the tendrils of black mist that were seeping from it, blurring its edges. Immediately they retracted and her leg was stable again. Her father smiled approvingly and Chloe sighed in relief and focused on the TV to distract herself. There was some generic morning chat show on, and the host was talking to three teenage girls. Chloe was about to change the channel when she suddenly noticed the headline at the bottom of the screen:

EXTRAORDINARY LIVES: WE’RE SHAPESHIFTERS, AND WE’RE PROUD OF OUR ABILITIES!

Chloe scrambled for the remote control, turning the volume up full blast.

“So the three of you are shapeshifters?” the host of the show asked, smiling his patented generic smile.

“It’s like, a bit more complicated than that,” one of them said coyly, “but essentially yes that’s what we are.”

“Okay, and what can you change in to?”

“Anything,” another piped up excitedly. “Actually our bodies shift naturally when left to themselves; we have to work pretty hard to stay in one form for a long time.”

“And that’s what you’re doing now?”

“Mmhmm.”

“I have to say girls, but I’m finding this a little farfetched; would you mind giving us a demonstration?”

“Sure!”

Chloe’s jaw dropped as the bodies of three girls on the TV exploded outwards in a haze of black mist, and their bodies started going through their natural cycle of shifting between forms – human, animal, and anything in between; forms that shouldn’t exist naturally. There was a shocked gasp and several screams from the audience, while the host of the show smiled triumphantly. Distantly, Chloe registered her father muttering something, but she was far too engrossed in what was happening on the TV; shifters, revealing themselves to the world without a care, and so far, no one was trying to kill them! And they hadn’t killed anyone either!

“That’s amazing girls,” the host said.

“Thanks.”

“So can I ask why you’ve decided to go public with your ability?”

“We want to be famous,” the third shifter told him. “Like, make a reality TV show about our lives or something.”

“Well I think that sounds like a definitely possibility.” The host chuckled, but quickly went silent when he registered that one of the girls was sidling around the back of his chair, her hands caressing his neck. “Umm…”

“Brianna, what the hell are you doing?” one of the other girls hissed from the couch.

“I can’t help it Sarah,” Brianna said pitifully, her hands, now claws, starting to dig into the hosts neck. “He smells so good…” Long nails extended from her claws and pierced the host’s neck; he let out a cry of pain as blood ran from the puncture marks.

“You said you had it under control!” Sarah yelled, standing up and striding over to Brianna to pull her off the host.

“I’m sorry!” Brianna wailed, as she was dragged backwards.

She hadn’t managed to pull her claws out fully, and as she was dragged backwards they ripped open the skin of the host’s neck. Blood gushed out and Sarah stumbled backwards, throwing an arm over her mouth and nose. Now free, Brianna leapt onto the host, her mouth descending onto his neck, clamping down ferociously on the wounds to bite and tear at his skin and muscles. The host screamed and flailed, trying to shove her off, but his attempts were useless.

The studio was in chaos; people were screaming and trying to exit the room in a stampede. Several people tripped and fell and were trampled on, blood leaking out onto the floor from where they had been kicked and stepped on. Brianna was working her way through the now-dead host’s neck, Sarah was curled up on the floor, rocking and sobbing, and the third shifter had descended onto the audience, biting and tearing into any body that she got her claws on. The carnage continued on-screen for a few moments more before it went blank, the scene in the studio replaced with a sign saying ‘We’re sorry, we are currently experiencing technical difficulties.’

Chloe gaped soundlessly at the TV, her heart pounding and body shifting rapidly from one form to another, any semblance of control vanished.

Richard sighed, slowly folded up his newspaper and stood up.

“Shit,” he hissed, slamming the paper down on the table, causing Chloe to jump in alarm.

“I’m sorry honey, but you won’t be going to school today.”

“Why? No one’s going to know that I’m a shifter; I won’t act like them I swear! You know I have control!” Chloe protested.

“It’s nothing to do with your control,” her father replied, scrubbing a hand wearily over his face. “Now that those idiotic girls have revealed themselves to the world, people will start hunting us.”

“But no one knows what we are; we’ve always stayed hidden.”

“There are people out there, people from your mother and I’s past, that know of us. The only reason they haven’t come looking is because they’ve not needed to. But now…We have to leave. Go to your room and pack a suitcase – essentials only.”

“What? What do you mean we have to leave?”

“We need to leave Dublin.”

“For how long?”

“Until it’s safe. Which may be never, I don’t know. Go get your things now, we’re leaving in ten minutes whether you’re packed or not.”

Chloe stared at him wide-eyed, wanting to argue with him, plead with him, make him realise that there was no need for them to run. He stared back at her pleadingly, and Chloe all but sprinted out of the kitchen and up to her room. There was some brief agonising over which books to bring, but before she knew it Chloe was bundled into the passenger seat of her father’s car and they were speeding down the road. Richard’s legs were shifting so wildly Chloe was surprised he could work the pedals, and she struggled to gather her thoughts, to say something to him, try to figure out what was going on.

“Where are we going?” she eventually blurted out.

Her father sighed and replied, “Somewhere I’d hoped you’d never have to know about.”

So that’s excerpt #2. What did you think? Leave a comment and let me know. If you enjoyed it please reblog and let others know about it; it’s very much appreciated! :D Tomorrow I’ll pull all the material for this excerpt together onto one post and answer any asks that get sent in, so if you have a question please send it in!

C.x